JÓN LEIFS JÓN LEIFS complete songs FINNUR BJARNASON tenor ÖRN MAGNÚSSON piano BIS-2170 BIS-2170_booklet_f-b.indd 1 2015-10-20 17:16 JÓN LEIFS (1899–1968) Complete Songs Finnur Bjarnason tenor Örn Magnússon piano Total playing time: 80'28 Music publisher: Iceland Music Information Centre Minningarsöngvar um ævilok Jónasar Hallgrímssonar 6'31 Memorial Songs on the Death of Jónas Hallgrímsson, Op. 45 (1958) 1 Heimþrá (Homesickness) 2'29 2 Sólhvörf (Solstice) 2'52 3 Hjörtun hefjast (Hearts Rise Up) 1'01 Söngvar Söguhljómkviðunnar 4'57 Songs from the Saga Symphony, Op. 25 (1941) 4 Brennusöngur Skarphéðins (Skarphéðinn’s Song When Burning) 1'26 5 Húskarlahvöt (Exhortations to the Farmhands) 1'32 6 Helsöngur Þormóðar (Þormóður’s Death Song) 1'48 Tvö íslensk þjóðlög 5'11 Two Icelandic Folk Songs, Op. 19b (c. 1934–35) 7 Sofðu, unga ástin mín (Slumber Dearest Child of Mine) 4'13 8 Breiðifjörður (Fjord of a Thousand Islands) 0'55 Tvö sönglög 9'47 Two Songs, Op. 18a (1931–33) 9 Góða nótt (Good Night) 5'15 10 Ríma (Rhyme) 4'28 3 Þrjú erindi úr Hávamálum 3'43 Three Verses from Hávamál, Op. 4 (1924) 11 Þagalt ok hugalt (A King’s Child) 1'18 12 Ungr vark forðum (I Was Young) 1'05 13 Deyr fé (Beasts Die) 1'11 14 Stattu steinhús 0'59 Stand, House of Stone, Op. 47a (1958) Tvö sönglög 5'07 Two Songs, Op. 14a (1929–30) 15 Máninn líður (The Moon Glides) 2'07 16 Vögguvísa (Lullaby) 2'54 Þrír sögusöngvar 6'30 Three Songs from Icelandic Sagas, Op. 24 (1941) 17 Þat mælti mín móðir (My Mother Wants a Price Paid) 1'10 18 Ástarvísur til Steingerðar (Love Poems to Steingerður) 4'12 19 Haugskviða Gunnars (Gunnar’s Verse from His Mound) 0'54 Þrjú sönglög 9'12 Three Songs, Op. 23 (1941) 20 Þula (Verse) 3'03 21 Draugadans (Dance of the Spectres) 2'54 22 Vorkvæði (Spring Poem) 3'04 4 23 Minningaland 2'32 Memory-Land, Op. 27 No. 3 (1927–28) Ástarvísur úr Eddu 5'20 Love Verses from the Edda, Op. 18b (1931–32) 24 Löng er nótt (Long Is One Night) 3'04 25 Í Gymis görðum (In the Courts of Gymir) 2'07 Forníslenskar skáldavísur 7'33 Old Scaldic Verses from Iceland, Op. 31 (1944–45) 26 Höggvinsmál Þóris jökuls (Up on the Keel You Shall Climb) 1'21 27 Siglingavísa (Seafaring Verse) 1'12 28 Hrafnsmál (The Words of the Raven) 4'46 Þrjú íslensk kirkjulög 6'13 Three Icelandic Hymns, Op. 12a (1929) 29 Vertu guð faðir (Father Above) 1'53 30 Allt eins og blómstrið eina (Behold the Flower) 3'00 31 Upp, upp mín sál (Arise My Soul) 1'10 32 Torrek, Op. 33a (1947) 4'02 5 The Songs of Jón Leifs Jón Leifs (1899–1968) may have considered the symphony orchestra most ideally suited to his musical imagination, but the songs for voice and piano nevertheless constitute an important part of his creative output. The 32 songs (including several folk song arrange - ments) span Leifs’ entire career, and often give unusually clear insights into the com - poser, since song writing, more than his work in any other genre, was often inspired by deeply personal events in his life. They span a huge range of emotion and expression, from the most delicate of lullabies to the most forceful of epic songs. Leifs composed his first songs, Three Verses from Hávamál (Op.4), in the spring of 1924, shortly after grad - uating from the Leipzig Conservatory. Like the rest of his early output, these songs are terse and laconic both in form and content. Here one can already detect the influence of Icelandic folk song (in the irregular metres of A King’s Child and the parallel fifths of I Was Young). Still, the musical style is more dissonant and the chordal writing much less transparent than it would become only a few years later. Memory-Land, Op.27 No.3, to a poem by the late-Romantic poet Einar Benediktsson, is another early work. In the summer of 1926, when Leifs visited Iceland, Benediktsson gave the composer a manuscript copy of the still unpublished poem. Leifs composed his song in 1927–28, for male choir. The arrangement for voice and piano was made much later, probably in 1943, when Leifs incorporated the original setting into his Three Patriotic Songs for Male Choir, Op.27. In that guise, Memory-Land is a typical patriotic song with energetic rhythms and rich harmonies, but the solo version is more sparse and intense, with a percussive accompaniment. Perhaps Leifs felt little reason to retain the late-Romantic patriotic flavour of the original in the early 1940s, at a time when his chances of ever being able to return to his homeland seemed fairly slim. 6 The composition of songs with piano accompaniment was a recurrent feature of Leifs’ activities around 1930. The Three Icelandic Hymns, Op.12a (to hymns by the seven - teenth-century pastor Hallgrímur Pétursson) were composed in April 1929, following the death of Thorleifur Jónsson, Leifs’ father. One of the hymns, Father Above, was written two days after Jónsson’s death, and is a setting of a prayer that Leifs had learned when he was a small boy, from his father. A few months later the birth of his daughter Líf inspired a return to song composition. Jóhann Jónsson, a young Icelandic student in Leipzig (and already one of the outstanding modernist poets of his generation), was a good friend of the Leifs family. A few days after Líf’s birth he sent his Lullaby to Leifs, dedicating the poem to ‘little Líf’. Leifs’ setting of it is among his most popular works. In terms of musical mat e rial, the song uses only the simplest of means. The two elements of the triad are pre sented as fundamental opposites: the pure, drone-like fifth, strong and indestructible, and the third, flickering and unstable, always striving upwards, from minor to major. The power ful effect of the song is the result of this delicate flux between light and shadow. The Moon Glides was composed several months later, in April 1930. It is a darker, more ominous piece, partly because of the monotonous accompaniment and the rhythmic rigidity of the vocal line. Thus Leifs gives his music the lifeless at - mosphere of the ‘pale shadows’ of Jónsson’s poem. Between 1926 and 1934 Leifs made several ethnographic journeys to Iceland, tran - scrib ing and recording the rapidly disappearing remnants of Icelandic folk music. These trips were also valuable as a source of compositional inspiration, for many of his works composed during these years use folk music that Leifs himself collected. The second of the Three Icelandic Hymns, Op.12a, ‘Behold the Flower’, is an ornamented version (record ed by Leifs in the summer of 1926) of a well-known funeral hymn. The Two Ice - landic Folk Songs, Op.19b also use songs collected by Leifs. The melody to the folk 7 verse Fjord of a Thousand Islands was recorded in the summer of 1926, while Slumber Dearest Child of Mine dates from Leifs’ last recording journey in 1934. Apart from these tunes, which would not otherwise have survived, Leifs uses a well-known folk song in the middle section of his energetic Rhyme, Op.18a (again to poetry by Benediktsson). In the score Leifs does not specify the source of his melody, nor did he need to. The folk song, commonly known as ‘Kvölda tekur, sest er sól’ (‘Night Draws On, the Sun Has Set’), was printed in Bjarni Thorsteinsson’s folk song anthology in 1909 and continues to be one of the best-known Icelandic folk songs. Many of the leading Nazi ideologues were fascinated by Nordic culture, and Leifs’ career received a considerable (albeit short-lived) boost as the party came to power in 1933. His personal life, on the other hand, fared less well. It is tempting to speculate that, at a time when his marriage to Annie was foundering, Leifs gave vent to his marital frus - trations with the composition of the Love Verses from the Edda, Op.18b. The atmosphere of the songs is one of impatient standstill, a longing for the release of a pent-up passion. Leifs’ use of unresolved dissonances in the first song (Long Is One Night) draws the listener into a world of frustrated yearning; instead of being resolved in a traditional manner, each dissonance is superseded by a new one. In the second song (In the Courts of Gymir), the painfully extended phrases of the solo voice are a source of tension and impatience, which well fits the poem’s description of the beloved, whose beauty can only be enjoyed from afar. After the two sets of songs Opp.18 and 19b, Leifs commenced work on the Edda oratorio for soloists, choir and orchestra, and wrote no songs for al most a decade. Not until 1941, a few weeks after the disastrous reception of his Organ Concerto in Berlin, did Leifs turn again to writing for voice and piano. The Three Songs, Op.23, have a feeling of gloom and despair, which no doubt reflects Leifs’ own state of mind at this time. The first song, Verse, to a poem by Sigurður Grímsson, is grim and ominous, 8 with a hidden threat of persecution and destruction. In the second song, the Dance of the Spectres, these emotions are turned inside out. Here Leifs looks death straight in the face in a demented danse macabre, in which the piano adds to the effect both with its ponderous bass notes and with the deranged ‘skeleton dance’ in the higher register.